September 15, 2024. An overcast day, four and a half months into living off-grid. Two years earlier, in 2022, I’d stopped my car ten meters from a fox standing on the garden path, watching me. Back then, it didn’t have the opportunities it has now.

My daughter saw it first — a fox circling the duck pen. By the time I got there, it already had one of our ducks in its jaws, running for the fence. The chickens were making a sound I’d never heard from them before. Like an alarm switching on.

I ran out of the tiny house, already too late to stop the taking. It was a raw, damp day, and what struck me most was how unafraid the fox was. I wondered if it could be rabid — but rabies is tightly controlled here, and foxes are vaccinated. Whatever fear I had gave way to doing something. I grabbed everything in the house that resembled a weapon and put together something like a spear, hoping I wouldn’t need to use it.

The fox came back twice more that day, tracking its next target from behind the cornfield. Every time it got close to the fence, the chickens set off their alarm and I went out with a rake, a machete, my makeshift spear, trying to land a hit. It’s hard to describe how difficult it is to stop a fox with tools like that. I was scared — for the kids, for the animals, a little for myself too.

We lost two ducks that day before I managed to patch the torn wire mesh. The worst part wasn’t the ducks. It was knowing the fox was still out there, somewhere in the corn, and the animals could feel it — day and night. It wasn’t going to stop until the pens were empty. In the village, people put up signs selling fox traps. But even a trapped fox is a problem: I wasn’t going to handle it myself, and calling a hunter just means it gets released a kilometer into the woods. That’s not a solution — it’s a delay.

For a night or two I turned over harsher options in my head. None of them sat right — mostly because half the village walks dogs along that same tree line, and I wasn’t willing to risk an animal that wasn’t mine to risk. I let it go.

A few days later I was due to leave for an international tournament abroad — two weeks away from home. I couldn’t leave my wife to deal with this alone.

The fox turned out to be smarter than I expected. It noticed how much more I was moving around the chickens and ducks, and it disappeared for several days — long enough that I started to think it was over. All I could do was fox-proof the coops properly and hope they’d hold. I bought heavier mesh — 1x1cm, thicker gauge — and fixed it down with battens. For the henhouse itself, I used an old aviary a friend had given us: welded frame, heavy-gauge wire.

The entire two weeks I was gone, my wife kept me updated on the raids. They started just days after I left. The fox favored dawn, around five in the morning.

When I got back, I spent a few jet-lagged nights working out how I was going to end this properly. I won’t get into exactly what I used, or how I got it — some things I’d rather not put in writing — but I ended up with something that let me aim with a lot more confidence than a rake ever had.

I spent what was left of those jet-lagged nights out on the porch, a chicken leg as bait, ready. The fox didn’t show once.

Then, one morning, like clockwork. I was off work; my wife leaves for hers at exactly 07:00. I came down from the loft at 07:05 — jet-lagged, eyes barely open. Looked out the window. Overcast again. A rust-colored shape moving slowly toward the chickens, head low.

I got into position, missed the first attempt, reloaded, fired again. A hit. The fox bolted into the field. I had to go find it — a hurt fox collapsed on the road out front would be easy enough to trace back to me. Nobody else lives within a kilometer of that spot.

As I ran for the fence, I noticed a police car parked right outside it. For a second I couldn’t process what that meant. How could they possibly already know?

I packed up everything that could raise questions and headed the other way instead. Walked past the officers on my way out and realized — they were just traffic police, clocking speed on the road.

I never saw that fox again.

It came back two years later. The reason was drought. That’s the next one.